Various technologies exist which allow telephone service providers to extract information from switching and signaling components in the public switched telephone network (PSTN). This information allows these service providers to determine the current performance of their components and to predict future performance and thus plan for expansion. As one example, information collected from signaling components can be used to generate a call bin report for a telephony switch. A call bin report shows how many hours, and which hours of the day, the trunks on a switch are in use. Network engineers use call bin reports to plan for switch and/or trunk expansion.
Network capacity and network planning reports produced by conventional methods are often inaccurate, due to limitations in the databases used to produce the reports. For example, a local exchange routing guide (LERG) database table is often used in the generation of these reports, to determine which switch and which trunk line is associated with a particular phone number. However, the schema used by a conventional LERG table does not provide a single switch identifier for a phone number. Instead, multiple switch identifiers may be returned when a phone number is queried, resulting in inaccurate call bin counts. Thus, a need arises for these and other problems to be addressed.